NYTimes reviewer to Tesla: I didn’t sabotage my own trip

In the spat between Tesla Motors and the New York Times, reporter John M. Broder isn’t backing down.

On Monday, he suffered the full wrath of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who accused Broder of misleading readers with his account of an ill-fated road trip up the East Coast in a Tesla Model S. The gist of Broder’s story: the electric luxury car’s battery pack quickly lost its charge in cold weather, to the point where the car shut itself off and needed to be towed.

Musk, who took to Twitter and CNBC to express his displeasure, said Broder had neglected to mention that he hadn’t completely charged the battery. Musk also said the car’s data log showed that Broder “meandered” around Manhattan on a major detour that helped drain the battery.

On Tuesday, Broder replied with a detailed blog post, answering Musk’s accusations point by point. He said he had charged up the Model S until the car’s dashboard displayed “Charging Complete.” The trip through Manhattan, he said, added precisely two miles to his trip.

The part of Broder’s post that will raise eyebrows, however, concerns his explanation for why he didn’t plug in the Model S while staying overnight in Connecticut, even though he’d been worried about the car running out of juice.

“This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a “normal use,” no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it. Now that Tesla is striving to be a mass-market automaker, it cannot realistically expect all 20,000 buyers a year (the Model S sales goal) to be electric-car acolytes who will plug in at every Walmart stop.”

Obviously, charging overnight is not at all the same thing as plugging in during a quick grocery run. Expect Musk to make note of that as this disagreement continues.